Headphonix - Profile

What are JV's?
As I mentioned previously we're a new business therefore we don't have any 'old customers' to utilise.

Copy on our site is starting to work as we have begun creeping up the SERPS for some terms, though this has not translated into significant traffic yet. AdWords campaign major tweak and restart, so we'll see how efficient that tac is this time around.

Thanks for your contribution LTL, but I fear that while you are right in saying that the ideal way to promote a business may be to throw plenty of money at targeted marketing (then fine tune to focus on what does work and drop what doesn't) and if you don't have the money to acquire it through bank or angel financing, that this just is not practical for many small businesses.

Of course you need to speculate to accumulate in business, but when your budget is tiny the 'speculation' part of that old adage looks a lot like 'risk' and risk means the possibility of losing your dwindling budget with little to show for it.

When setting up a new business on a small budget every penny counts and I just want to make sure that it is used correctly so that my business can self fund its promotional strategies.

As a web copywriter (in my other business) I completely understand the need for regular quality content, insightful blogs, social media engagement and PPC investment, but with a tiny budget to play with it's all about establishing which is most likely to achieve the best and the fastest results.

I also appreciate that the answer to that one is that all of them are important to the growth of the business (though some have longer term benefits), and the quickest way for a new business to test the market and gain instant feedback and results is through Google AdWords. My question was really aimed at pushing outside of this standard sales and marketing comfort zone and seeing whether there were any members of this forum who had experienced good results through any other promotional means that I may not have already considered.

Any ideas?

I appreciate that loads of people are looking for an inexpensive or, dare I say it, a free way to market their businesses, but, not meaning to buck a popular trend, so am I.

I understand that this will probably involve SEO, PPC, article marketing, PR and social media engagement, but these are just the 'what' of marketing, I suppose I'm after more of the 'how' side of things...how do you make these methods work for you?

Any help would be hugely appreciated. I've just set up an e-commerce business and am looking for ways to get the word out about it, though I don't have the funds for flashy ads and long-term Google campaigns.

Richard

There are a few things you need to remember when starting a blog:
1. You are writing for your human audience not for search engines (these days good quality interesting content is actually what search engines are looking for anyway so these goals are becoming closer in alignment) so make it interesting, make it varied and make it often.
2. Write as often as you can as the only way to build readership loyalty and search engine interest is to create content on a regular basis.
3. Write articles of around 300 to 600 words long. Any shorter and you can't really tell an interesting story, much longer and you run the risk of losing their interest.
4. Keyword inclusion is good, but keyword stuffing is bad. The SEO companies I work with who once would have told us all to achieve between 5 and 10% keyword density (crazy), and now saying that anything over 1% is bad and that what you should be focusing on is synonyms, a variety of words that focus on a keyword theme rather than a keyword density.
5. Find a platform to write your blogs on that is both aesthetically pleasing and simple to use, because you want people to want to read your work, but you don't want it to take an age to upload it.

Finally remember that you are creating an online persona through your blog. Decide your voice right from the beginning, will it be reflective of your brand or a softening side to a very serious business?

Hope that helps.

7 years ago I set up a business that got some excellent PR exposure. I did use a PR firm to achieve this but the one thing I noticed was that one good bit of exposure, whether it was on TV, radio, broadsheet or magazine generated a ripple effect, that resulted in more interest from other journalists and editors, so one piece became 2, then 4 then more, and that's the true power of a good PR campaign.

5 years ago I started up as a copywriter myself and have written for a number of clients who wanted to achieve success through PR in a more DIY fashion, approaching magazines and other publications with content I'd produced for them in the hope of building a regular relationship with them. I have seen it work, so if you can write interesting and engaging copy that's preferably related to something currently in the news, tugs at the heartstrings or finds some other way of interesting the media at large there's nothing more cost effective than approaching relevant media, finding out who the best contacts are and sending them your written work. Better still, find out what they are looking for and write it for them. And best of all, promote yourself as an authority on a subject and become a regular contributor.

Good luck.

I suppose the answer is that it totally depends on what you are selling. For may products these days we're told that we must have a Facebook page, a Twitter account a YouTube Channel, a Google + account and Pinterest board, but of course some products just don't warrant that kind of social attention.

That being said we have just run a Facebook campaign and found that we probably got our moneys worth in attention. We only spent